Week 6: Utilizing Extra Real Estate
You have a lot of extra real estate on LinkedIn that gets underutilized. So let’s take a look at some of the things you can do with these sections and tools on LinkedIn.
Monday: Customize Contact Me
The Contact Me section (which shows up as Contact [Your Name] For) is found at the bottom of your profile. This section is often completely ignored by LinkedIn users. But you can add up to 2,000 characters of additional information to your profile in this section. Next to Contact (Your Name), click the Change Contact Preferences link to edit this field.
As you can see in Figure 3-10, the first part of this section will be familiar to you.
Figure 3-10: Customizing Contact Settings
For types of messages you’ll accept, choose I’ll Accept Introductions And InMail.
Under Opportunity Preferences, I recommend checking all of the boxes. (The only exception for this might be for currently employed job seekers who don’t want their boss to know they are seeking employment. In that case, leave Job Inquiries unchecked.)
Now we come to the good part. In the field that asks “What advice would you like to give users considering contacting you?” you can write just about anything you want. You would never know it by looking at this teeny tiny field, but you have 2,000 characters of real estate to work with.
Some uses for this section:
- Add more contact information like phone numbers, email addresses, and any website addresses you couldn’t add to the Websites section (unfortunately, they will not be linked).
- Add recommendations or testimonials from people not on LinkedIn.
- Add additional information about yourself or your business.
- Create what I call Rules of Engagement to let people know what you are, and what you are not willing to share and do on LinkedIn (I’ll discuss this in a moment).
A great example of this is Kenneth Weinberg’s LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com/in/kennethweinberg (more on Rules of Engagement in the next section).
If there is something you want to add to your LinkedIn profile and you’ve run out of space in another field, this is the place to put it. (This area is not keyword searchable, so you don’t have to keyword-stuff it!)
Definitely create this first in a Word document.
Tuesday: Create Rules of Engagement
There is no official section called Rules of Engagement. Nonetheless, you might want to create your own set of communication rules and share them with your network in the Contact section mentioned earlier.
Rules to consider:
- Who are you willing to connect to? Only people you know? Friends of friends? Anyone?
- Who are you willing to write a recommendation for? Will you write recommendations only for colleagues? Employees? Peers? For people you don’t know? Do you want people to give you some hints about what to write? Do you want a recommendation in return?
- Who are you willing to make an introduction for? Anyone in your network? Only people you know? Who are you willing to send an introduction on to? Anyone in your network? Only people you know? What do you want from your contact in order to pass along an introduction? An explanation of why they want to be introduced?
- Who are you willing to receive messages and InMails from? Potential clients and customers, people wanting to get reacquainted, potential vendors?
- What will cause you to disconnect from someone? Spam in your message box? Spam via InMail? Getting added to newsletters without permission? Being added to a giant LinkedIn letter without BCC? Sexual solicitations or requests for your social security number because there is money waiting for you in another country?
Writing your Rules of Engagement doesn’t guarantee that people will actually follow them, but it’s a good first step. A great example of this is Kenneth’s profile, as you can see in Figure 3-11.
Figure 3-11: Rules of Engagement
Wednesday: Add LinkedIn Skills & Expertise
The Skills section allows you to add your own unique skills to your LinkedIn profile. Earlier we looked at Skills (found under More in the main toolbar at the top of the page) to find the Related Skills you can use as keywords. But how can you add and edit your Skills section once you have added it?
To edit your Skills section, scroll down into the body of your profile when you are in Edit Profile mode. As of this writing, both Edit and Add A skill will take you to the page shown in Figure 3-12.
Once on this page, you can add any skill you have, even underwater basket weaving if you want! (You cannot do this under the More tab.) You can delete any skill that is not relevant to your skill set, and you can shift your skills around to list your most pertinent skills first by dragging and dropping them.
You can even move this whole section up higher in your profile, as you will see in the next section.
Take a few minutes to cull your skills list, add skills unique to you and your abilities, and prioritize what you have. You can add up to 50 skills, although I think a happy medium of about 25 skills looks best.
Figure 3-12: Editing Skills & Expertise
Thursday: Moving Things Around
I’ve already mentioned that you can move some of LinkedIn’s sections around.
To do this, you must be in Edit Profile mode. Shift your cursor over the heading of the section you want to move. Your cursor will change, which will allow you to grab your section by clicking on it while holding your mouse button down. (On some computers, it’s a right-click.) Shift your section to the area you want and then drop it in by releasing your mouse or tracking pad.
You can see how to do this in Figure 3-13.
Some areas you can shift:
- The entire Experience section.
- Individual current Experience sections within the greater Experience section. (Past experience will remain in chronological order.)
- The entire Education section.
- Individual schools within the Education section.
- Your entire Summary section, including Specialties if appropriate.
- All of your added sections.
- The whole Recommendations section.
- Individual Recommendations according to Experience.
- The entire Additional Information section.
- The entire Contact section.
Figure 3-13: Moving things around
This is how I set up my profile and why.
I left the Summary And Specialties section right where it was. It’s the first thing that shows up below the fold and is still often read by the people who find my profile. Since it includes the WIIFM (what’s in it for them), it becomes an important sales tool for me.
I then pulled my Contact section up underneath Summary because I had more information I wanted to share. I added several valuable free resources (in the form of URLs) as well as descriptions of what those resources were and what they could do for the reader.
Because I think what others say is more important than what I say, I pulled my Recommendations up underneath the Contact Me section. As of this writing, you cannot shift the recommendations by Experience, but at least you can shift the recommendations within the Experience listing.
After Recommendations I added Skills, Publications, and then Applications to give people a better sense of my abilities and what I bring to the table (as well as examples of my writing and a video).
Then I added my Experience and Education and finished up with my Additional Information.
List your sections in order of importance to you—or more importantly, list your sections according to what is important to you potential clients, employees, employers, donors, vendors, or partners.
Friday: Back It Up
So once again it’s Friday, and I’m going to make it easy on you. All I want you to do is back up your LinkedIn profile. There are a few different ways to do that.
The old-fashioned way: The first thing you can do is open your profile on LinkedIn. Make sure you are in View Profile mode (this option appears on the Profile tab).
Most browsers have an edit function, so under Edit on your browser, click Select All and then Copy. Open a new word processing page (Word, Pages, Google Docs, OpenOffice) and click Paste. I recommend that you choose Save As Text Only because otherwise you’re going to have a lot of graphics and wonky formatting to deal with.
This is just a backup. You probably won’t be showing this to anyone, although you might use it in the future to cut and paste information into your LinkedIn profile if for some reason yours get corrupted. (I’m a big fan of repurposing content, as you already know.) It’s always good to have your LinkedIn profile backed up in case something happens. Once you have your profile in a document, save it as LinkedIn backup and add the date so you can differentiate between backups. Put it into your Stuff for LinkedIn folder.
For a nicer backup of your profile, save it as a PDF. This is less editable, but much nicer to share. I’ve shown you the PDF link in Figure 3-14.
From View Profile, you’ll scroll down until you see the PDF icon. Click that icon and a PDF will open up. (If you don’t have a PDF reader, I recommend Adobe Reader. You can download Adobe Reader at www.adobe.com/products/reader.html.)
Once the PDF opens, go to the File tab and click Save As. You save it as a PDF or text file, or to Word or Excel online.
Of course, if you want a hard copy of your profile you can simply print it in that same section. Or you can save as a PDF from your printer as well.
And by the way, you can do this with other people’s profiles as well as long as they are in your network. (For out-of-network folks, you can only share or print—there’s no option to save as a PDF.)
Figure 3-14: Backing up your profile
So go on! Go back up your LinkedIn profile right now. And we will see you next week for Chapter 4, “Weeks 7–9: Use Your Company Profile for Branding and Positioning.”